Orthodox Cosmos @ 83posed of quarklike 0bjects.A third group believes the Higgs particle to
be a bound state of "top7' and "antitop" quark.
But why, asks Leon Lederman-eminent particle physicist, author
of The God Particle--hasn't Higgs been universally embraced? Tartly he
replies, "Because Veltman, one of the Higgs architects, calls it a rug
under which we sweep our ignorance. Glashow [professor of particle
physics at Harvard], a toilet in which we flush away the inconsistencies
of our present theories."
Yet physics will not work without the equivalent of a Higgs field.
The notion is simple enough: all space contains a field, the Higgs
field, which permeates the vacuum and is the same everywhere. The
word vacuum, says Dr. Smith, may make the reader's mind boggle.
Normally used to indicate a space from which air or any other gas has
been removed, vacuum is used by physicists in the same nonliteral
sense as they use color orjlavor to describe mathematical properties that
cannot be expressed in ordinary language, such as properties of quarks
and omegons.
Search for a Higgs field "in the vacuum of space" developed after all
efforts had failed to find a clue to the origin of mass, mass being de-
scribed by physicists as "a body's resistance to acceleration," quaintly
measured in "slugs."'
Lederman hints that the function of the Higgs particle is to give
mass to massless particles, mass no longer being considered an intrinsic
property of particles but a property acquired by the interaction of par-
ticles with their environment. Pervading all space, says Lederman, the
Higgs field is "cluttering up the void, tugging on matter, making it
heavy."Waxing both sinister and fey, he describes the problem: "We be-
lieve a wraithlike presence throughout the universe is keeping us from
understanding the true nature of matter... .The invisible barrier that
keeps us from knowing the truth is called the Higgs field. Its icy tenta-
cles reach into every corner of the universe.... It works in black
magic through a particle, the Higgs boson, or God particle."
- A slug is a unit of mass equal to the mass accelerated at the rate of one foot per
second when acted upon by a force of one pound weight.